2011 Music

Voices from the Killing Jar: for Voice and Sextet

Soper, Katharine P.

A killing jar is a tool used by entomologists to kill butterflies and other insects without damaging their bodies: a hermitically sealable glass container, lined with poison, in which the specimen will quickly suffocate. Voices from the Killing Jar is a seven movement work which depicts a series of female protagonists caught in their own kinds of killing jars: hopeless situations, inescapable fates, impossible fantasies, and other unlucky circumstances. Their jailers, the ones screwing the lid on tight, are sometimes friends or lovers, sometimes strangers, and sometimes themselves, their longings and ambitions and delusions. Voices from the Killing Jar visits these women only for a diary entry or a scene or a chapter in their lives, lets them speak for a moment, and then returns them to history and myth. The world in which these characters live for the span of this piece is constructed from among the countless possible sonic environments of the seven-member Wet Ink Core Ensemble, which includes: Kate Soper, soprano/clarinet/piano/percussion; Erin Lesser, flutes; Alex Mincek, clarinet/tenor saxophone; Ian Antonio, percussion; Eric Wubbels, piano; Sam Pluta, electronics player/baritone. Additional players may be used to accommodate the doubling in the case of performances by other ensembles (see instrumentation page).